I've seen lots of people talk about it Gio and think it's a fairly common strategy. As far as how effective it is and how much importance Google places on image citations, only the big G knows for sure.

Yep pretty sure it's My Maps which USED to boost rank but no longer does. Some low end guys sell these cuz they are easy to make and people that don't know any better still think it works, so they are still making sales.

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Every type of content, not just pictures, that could somehow be associated with the business, could potentially count as additional trust source and thus help up rankings. I believe content that is not text (such as pictures and videos) is most easily recognized as belonging to some business based on its Geo-location, at least my observations are such. So sites such as Panoramio and YouTube, for instance, that have the option for the user to Geo-tag the photos/videos are most easily recognized as "citations" by Google. Again, this is just my observation.

Regarding MyMaps, as Linda already said, they don't seem to be working anymore, at least not to be working that well as they used to before October 2010. I've heard some famous local SEOs say that they might actually still carry some value, though much lesser than before. I haven't experimented myself, though.

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